17 September 2008

Rock & Roll Bombs

Keith Richards was 1 when he was evacuated from suburban London to avoid German buzz bombs. What are the odds that a pioneer of rock and roll's loud sound would have first become conscious of the world during a time of loud explosions and great excitement?

Bob Dylan (credits? blames?) the atom bomb for rock and roll. He said,

I know [the atom bomb] gave rise to the music we were playing. If you look a ll these early performers, they were atom-bombed fueled. Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran ...How were they atom-bomb fueled?They were fast and furious, their songs were all on the edge. Lyrically, you had the blues singers, but Ma Rainey wasn't singing about the stuff that Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee were singing about, nobody was singing with that type of fire and destruction.

With that as background, here is the inimitable genius David Byrne (I'm fairly certain that Jane Fonda got the idea for the aerobics craze from a Talking Heads concert).